Tyroo report explores advertising on social networks

According to the report, Orkut was the most popular social networking site among the respondents and marketers plan to increase their ad spend on social media networks

Tyroo, the & #BANNER1 & # online advertising network owned by Smile Interactive Technologies and Yahoo!, has released a report on how social networks are being used for advertising.

For the inhouse report, Tyroo spoke to 400 social network users and 20 marketers who have advertised on the platform. The results show that about 68 per cent of the people surveyed log on to Orkut, 18 per cent use Facebook and 7 per cent log on to Hi5. The less popular sites among the respondents are MySpace (2.9 per cent) and LinkedIn (2.5 per cent).

According to the report, age groups are more evenly distributed on Facebook as compared to MySpace and Hi5. On Facebook, 30 per cent of the users from among the respondents are aged 25-34 years, 29 per cent are aged 18-24 years, while 15 per cent are above the age of 55. This gives the impression that Facebook has a significant mature audience. Facebook is also more women friendly, with 44 per cent women among the respondents.

The report further states that social networking sites account for 44 per cent of India's traffic on the Internet. Around 58 per cent of the respondents said they logged on to a social networking site right after checking their email.

As many as 90 per cent of the respondents said they visited a social networking site every day. The report also claims that users seem to recall the ads they see there.

More than 75 per cent of the marketers surveyed said they would increase their advertising spend on social media in the next three years.

For advertisers, the report makes some recommendations and highlights some issues in advertising on social networks. For one, social networking is more suitable for branding campaigns, which should not be measured by CPM (cost per thousand) by the advertisers.

The report also shows that viral marketing works well on social networking sites. Around 62 per cent of the marketers surveyed said that word of mouth or viral campaigns have "great potential to impact their businesses". This is supported by the finding that 30 per cent of the users said they trust their peers as against 10 per cent who said they trust advertising.